At first, this book was not so appealing to me. The first few pages of the books show map of some unknown land, well at least not that I know of. Apparently it was a map of Mars’ surface (remember the title of the book is The Martian! :P).

The story then started with Sol 6 log entry from a surviving astronaut that was left behind by his team during an unusual storm attacking their martian exploration mission. He survived being blown away by a storm and got separated from the rest of his fellow team mate who managed safely reached their spaceship that will bring them back to Earth.

Well, sol is day count in Mars which is shorter a few hours compared to Earth’s 24 hours daily round the clock.

The story then continued for many sols later telling in detail how Mark Watney -the astronaut’s name which amazingly survived the hazard- fought his way to save his very own life. Not until sol 42 which is chapter 6 of the book another character is introduced. It was a bit lonely reading sessions I had until sol 42. I got the very same feeling as when I was watching Tom Hank’s Cast Away. Lonely and helpless. But right after the introduction of the NASA people, I feel relieved that this Watney will get some support later on in the book.

How to rescue Watney then became the focus of the book after how he tried to save his very own life. Well, along the book, Watney was still trying very hard to keep himself alive until his rescuer came and picked him up. A very unexpected ending of this book kind of surprised me.

Well, story wise it was good but not the one with extraordinarily twisted plot or any unexpected development, meeting any native martian, for instance. But the strength of this book is how Andy Weir described everything from Mark Watney’s way of thinking in very detailed way for everything he was doing. Did I mention that Watney’s character is an engineer and a botanist?

So I got to know how to seal a leaking space suit, growing potatoes in martian atmosphere until how to convert short range two martian explorer rovers into a trailer for 3,200 km journey to next martian exploration project after his for the rescue. I bought it that Watney could survive on Mars for a year and a half.

This book is definitely satisfied my hunger for science fiction and deep space exploration after last year I watched Gravity and Interstellar. I imagine how would be the movie for this book.

This might be so good and mind-blowing, but I’m still paranoid since the last time I read Life of Pi : this book is also about surviving, isn’t it? I can’t help the feeling pf loneliness and helplessness 😆